Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:25:00 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:25:00] S0: So you're saying if your product is content, just to be provocative for a second, the question is, do you even exist? Is there a place for you at all? [00:25:08] S1: Perhaps. But then this is where the sort of dead internet theory comes in. Because ironically, the large language models, or just answer engines, generally speaking, if you wanna call it that chat, Gemini, etcetera, they rely on the content in order to answer the question. Of course. So the thing, like, the example I always use is, you know, say if there were, God forbid, an explosion downstairs on Broadway, chat... And we ask ChatGPT right now and said, what's going on on Broadway? It doesn't know the answer to that question. It doesn't know what's happened on Broadway. What it's relying on is a fleshy human being experiencing the explosion downstairs and writing a blog post, a news article, something about the explosion, and then it can go and rag that into its answer. So humans play this very important role where we are becoming like APIs between reality and AI. [00:26:02] S0: That's so interesting. Humans are... That that... That's a good one. Humans are becoming an API between reality and this agentic future.
00:26:02 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:26:02] S0: That's so interesting. Humans are... That that... That's a good one. Humans are becoming an API between reality and this agentic future. [00:26:10] S1: Which maybe replace... You wanna get a bit Stanley Kubrick with it for a second. And I I think the sort of final destination is once you go into humanoid robotics, okay, well now, or maybe drones, it doesn't necessarily need to be, maybe OpenAI will have humanoid robots. I mean, the most obvious one here is x AI having humanoid robots scattered around the city that can experience that explosion downstairs on Broadway. [00:26:39] S0: And alert the systems. [00:26:41] S1: Yeah. Or not even alert. They would essentially sort of play the role of the reporter in that sense where they're like, hey, this is what's going on. This is what's happened. This is what this person said. Then the cops came at 11:58. And this is... And that it no longer requires a human being to act as this conduit between reality and the Internet. But, yeah, in the short term, yeah, our our ability to to translate reality to the internet is very relied on by these large language models, by the labs to create a good product. [00:27:18] S0: I want to dig into a few more of your predictions, because I think you are in such an incredibly unique perch of being able to see how the future looks. If you fast forward three to five years, what other things just seem obvious to you that maybe aren't obvious to everybody else?
00:27:18 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:27:18] S0: I want to dig into a few more of your predictions, because I think you are in such an incredibly unique perch of being able to see how the future looks. If you fast forward three to five years, what other things just seem obvious to you that maybe aren't obvious to everybody else? [00:27:35] S1: I mean, more in our world, in the world of marketing, a thing that we are very bullish on is that every brand on the planet will have their own eval or their own evals and their own set of evals that essentially determine what good looks like for their marketing and communications, etcetera. And AI utilize those evals. So let's say Walmart will have an eval for, like, this is what good Walmart brand marketing looks like. This is what good, a good PDP looks like. This is what a good press release looks like. This is what a good billboard looks like. And Walmart will own that eval. And that is really the moat of these businesses in the future will be that that eval becomes very important because in a world where intelligence has evolved to where we think it's going to to get to, it will be able to utilize, you know, you'll pipe in the intelligence like electricity, and it will be able to utilize that eval to create great marketing, basically. Because great in the world of marketing is very subjective. [00:28:46] S0: And it's moving. That's right. Right? It's not only just subjective, it's constantly evolving. [00:28:50] S1: That's correct. The ice bucket challenge. If you did that today, if we went into the ice bucket challenge right now, it wouldn't go by.
00:28:50 · James Cadwallader, Alexa von Tobel
[00:28:50] S1: That's correct. The ice bucket challenge. If you did that today, if we went into the ice bucket challenge right now, it wouldn't go by. [00:28:58] S0: At all. In fact, let's not do that. I appreciate that. Silly question. But if I was trying... Let's say I run a showerhead company. Mhmm. Okay? And it's 2030, and I'm trying to sell my showerhead. How do I think differently than I would today? [00:29:15] S1: As I said at the beginning, you will create a 100 x more market take. And you will understand that creating 100x more marketing with AI does not equal slot. Creating great marketing with AI is a skill. And we have thousands of customers using ProFound agents to create lots of marketing. And what we see is not a one and a zero. These people use AI to do their marketing and they're winning, these people don't and they're boozing. We see it as more of a one to 100. And the customers that are in the, you know, from the ninetieth, the one hundredth percentile, they are doing wonderful things with agents and they're building marketing that is not at parity with the marketing they were doing with humans. It is beyond what was possible with humans. They're creating marketing that wasn't possible before.
00:29:15 · James Cadwallader, Alexa von Tobel
[00:29:15] S1: As I said at the beginning, you will create a 100 x more market take. And you will understand that creating 100x more marketing with AI does not equal slot. Creating great marketing with AI is a skill. And we have thousands of customers using ProFound agents to create lots of marketing. And what we see is not a one and a zero. These people use AI to do their marketing and they're winning, these people don't and they're boozing. We see it as more of a one to 100. And the customers that are in the, you know, from the ninetieth, the one hundredth percentile, they are doing wonderful things with agents and they're building marketing that is not at parity with the marketing they were doing with humans. It is beyond what was possible with humans. They're creating marketing that wasn't possible before. [00:30:13] S0: How do we avoid slop? To your point, and I've been involved with, we have a bunch of companies, ShopMy and others that are kind of on the edge of e commerce, where a lot of people actively are talking about how when it's very clear that content and pictures and videos are created by agents, our brains at some point are going to turn off. And even some of your biggest influencers are like, hey, we've got to be really careful because the second what I create looks and feels like slop is the second people start to tune out. How do we avoid the slop? [00:30:52] S1: Slop is a skin issue. Slop is [00:30:57] S0: That's really well said.
00:30:57 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:30:57] S0: That's really well said. [00:30:58] S1: Like you don't know how to use AI to build quality marketing. So if you think the solution is to abandon generative AI and do it by hand, I mean, you can take that approach, but just understand that there are very talented people out there that are using AI in way more sophisticated ways. Like the reason it's slop is probably [00:31:17] S0: That is incredible. I fully appreciate your point, which is it is not to abandon AI. If it feels like slop, it's because it was misused. It's using improperly. [00:31:27] S1: Yeah, you put in a two line prompt and hoped for the best. And then wondered why that generic AI created generic marketing. So context is the antidote to slop. And what we see is, I mean, this really speaks to the vision for the evals that I'm talking about. That is just the most extreme version of context. It's you are trying to inject your brand voice, your values, your organizational structure, your permissioning, like understanding where the human should review, where the human should approve. All of these tenants are what we're seeing companies in ProFound do now. Have context manager, which is a dynamic understanding of everything about your brand, product, services, competitive landscape, market. And all of that is piped into a harness so that when you type in the one line prompt saying, have we write a blog? It's pulling from all of that context layer to build a blog that sounds like you.